A Secret Man of Blood

Chapter Twenty

The old Roenan rolls his eyes with voice alone. "It just...helps to know that," he sighs.

Anomandara has never thought about any man, beyond what he can offer in a fight and, as she approaches the horses she turns, alerted. Her voice holds a warning.

"Fifth Sword..."

There's a brittle silence before Borya says. "You go into great danger."

"Speak up!" she replies, though she heard him clearly.

"You go into great danger!"

"Don't shout."

"Okay."

Anomandara smiles and a flicker of humour passes through her eyes, but then the hard coals of resolution return. "My peril is the peril of every leaf and flower when they pass with the seasons, no more. They must die and so will I."

Borya breathes deeply, sensing that this is the moment he's waited so long for to declare his feelings. "I'm coming with you."

"No, you're not."

"Okay."

The lights of his eyes are a flock of stars under a harsh and peerless sun. Anomandara smiles, because she thinks that might make him feel better, then mounts her horse and rides.

In the ruined Roenan camp, burned and broken tents crouch like animals, several arrows whizzing past Anomandara's head as she rides through. More shoot out of the trees and she deflects them, urging her horse forward into a spearman and cutting him down with a horrific crunch, then decapitating another. That's one surprising thing about these Elves: they fight as one gender, with no preference for females at all. The males seem to be just as competent, which is hard to believe.

She dismounts, the current of her fury carrying her this way and that: she cuts half a dozen archers to pieces in little more than a second. Horror at her speed, grace and power paralyses the next group. It's like she's an artist breathing life into war, moulding it into terrible new forms and putting everything she has into it: all her native honour, the quiet, sensitive child, the rage, the years of seclusion, every element of her being split into fingers, each one wielding its tools of memory and preservation as best it can.

Elves die in their dozens, then their hundreds before her inexhaustible force, springing this way and that, always out of danger but delivering death. Limbs fall like leaves, clambering like angry bees at her feet until she has to move on to the next killing ground.

Blade echoes chime into silence and she's the only one alive, amid a sea of corpses. But that was only an advance party. The Elven force is still some way off.

*

A livid, glaring white sun rifles the horizon of all its details, wind rasping dryly across the peaks. Salazar's eyes roll over the scenery. "Remarkable," he murmurs, his voice deep and cold as stones. "No two days ever look the same. Even this static horizon is, in the smallest details, somehow different from all the moments that came before: the great brush has never rested, its paint will never dry," he quotes.

Beside him, Pilar smiles at a memory. "It's unfortunate they abandoned their heir. I will offer them the child free of conditions."

"I have no wish to see a child suffer," Salazar agrees. "Though war inevitably forces suffering upon the weakest and they've brought war to us time and time again. The child will be safe with us: why should we appease them?"

"Bringing one word of peace safely to harbour from such stormy seas is not to be scorned."

"They're supremacists. They'll say we returned her out of fear," Salazar says, with considerable prescience. "A setting sun cannot share the sun with the rising; they are the old and we are the new."